"Webbiquity" is about being everywhere online when and where buyers are looking for what you sell. It's what I help B2B clients achieve through a coordinated strategy of SEO, search marketing, social media, brand management, content marketing, and influencer relations, supported by the right marketing technology.

Which factors are really most important in search engine rankings? How do search engines treat different forms of keywords? How can you get the most of out of Google’s free webmaster tools to improve rankings? What other tools are worth checking out for keywords, linking and website analysis?

Find the answers to these questions and others here in more of the best SEO blog posts from this year.

Stoney deGuyter offers valuable insights on how search engines treat keywords, such as that capitalization (usually) doesn’t matter, keywords have more weight if they are used in a title or header tag or are bolded, and search engines are getting better at recognizing forms of a word (e.g. sites including “kayaks” or “kayaking” will show up on a search for “kayak”). On that last point though, keep in mind that for popular search phrases, even a single character can make a big difference. For example, one website shows up at #2 on Google for “business services management,” but at #23 for business service management.

This post combines useful information about setting up b2b SEO and SEM campaigns (such as getting the website information architecture right to start with, choosing keywords carefully with an eye toward the long tail, using PPC advertising effectively, and targeting local search) with humor—at least to those of us who live and breathe b2b marketing, and are amused by how perplexing it can be to b2c marketing agencies. Another noteworthy post from this blog is Get Keyword Rank Data from Google Webmaster Tools, provides detailed step-by-step instructions for analyzing website performance using Google’s webmaster tools. This is geekier than even most search marketers will go, but can supply valuable insights.

Thomas McMahon serves up more tips for using Google’s webmaster tools, including how to spot site errors such as broken links, analyze meta and title tags, and identify a site’s top keyword search queries.

Dan LeFree explains how properly set up forwarding for multiple domain names to a single website without being penalized by the search engines for duplicate content. The site looks a little spammy, but the article is a helpful, quick read.

An excellent piece from Janet Meiners Thaeler on manipulative practices to watch out for when hiring an SEO firm, such as “guaranteed” rankings, use of hidden links, and duplicate content on multiple domains or subdomains. For more on this topic, see Just Say No to Bad SEO on SEOmoz.

Ron Jones reviews several keyword, site grader and linking tools. His favorite keyword tool is the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool; as Ron explains, “I like this one because it links to most of the other existing keyword tools, such as Wordtracker, Keyword Discovery, and tools from Google, MSN, and Yahoo. This one tool lets you explore many others.”

What’s the magic formula for SEO success? Julie Shumaker writes that “Setting realistic goals, measuring the right thing, and establishing a baseline” are all key parts of the process. She emphasizes that SEO is a long-term project, that getting on page one of Google isn’t always realistic (at least in the short term), and that ultimately, traffic and conversions are what matters—not just rankings. Another excellent SEO post from Search Engine Land is The Evolving State Of Social Media & SEO. Eric Enge notes that “social media will be a major source of ranking signals for the search engines in the future,” both due to its link-building potential and the emergence of real-time search.

Following on the same theme as the post above, Mark Jackson writes a case study on setting realistic expectations with SEO clients. It’s very difficult for small websites to outrank large ones, particularly for highly competitive phrases. Among his conclusions: more content helps. Blogging helps. Social media works. Link buying isn’t supposed to help, but it does, and some large companies spend big bucks on this, which is difficult for smaller firms to compete with. Focusing on longer-tail terms can provide respectable traffic and conversions without huge costs.

Aaron Wall explains that because new or small sites without a large number of external links pointing to them are unlikely to rank well for highly competitive search phrases, it’s better to focus on longtail terms first, building up trust, links and traffic gradually. This post includes a couple of excellent graphics showing the differences in how search engine algorithms treat highly competitive terms from more specific longtail phrases.

For those new to SEO, Rand Fishkin provides some excellent advice on mistakes to avoid including reciprocal linking (it doesn’t work, and it looks spammy), targeting the same keyword on multiple pages, and not using XML sitemaps. My only quibble would be with his advice to use the nofollow attribute for PageRank sculpting; the nofollow tag is insidious and the value questionable.

Ryan Caldwell ventures from the philosopical to the practical in this post, providing 10 key indicators of website SEO quality, from “lean code and meaty content” along with proper tag usage to listing a physical address and toll-free phone number. Another notable post from Search Engine Journal is There Is No Secret Sauce in SEO! , in which James Morris debunks several common SEO myths, such as that there is “mystical secret formula” or “complicated scientific method” to achieving SEO success. He closes with advice on where to begin, and the missions of an SEO including a clear understanding of goals up front and collaborating with developers and writers to optimize content.

Mike Keller offers a helpful set of tips for new bloggers to optimize their blogs for search, covering basics such as variable title tags in Blogger (note: this won’t work with all templates), meta tags and setting up RSS feeds.

Alex Cristache details five common SEO mistakes bloggers make that cause their sites to fare more poorly than necessary in search engine rankings. Among the mistakes are ignoring (or improper use of) h1, h2 etc. title tags, and viewing SEO as a one-time process rather than an ongoing discipline.

Dev Basu provides five tips to SEO consultants on how to successfully sell their services, such as asking good questions, focusing on solving client problems, and identifying exactly what the prospective client needs to know (and then not wasting time by telling them everything under the sun). Great tips for SEOs who know their craft but may struggle with business development.

In this extensive and thoughtful post, Michael Martinez discusses the impact of trends such as personalized search, universal search and social media, and advises SEO professionals to focus on optimizing for query spaces (all the queries and content relevant to a specific topic) in order to capture traffic for long tail keywords.

Jill Whalen exposes the simple two-word answer that applies to nearly any question about SEO, including how quickly Google indexes new pages, what to do if your search position suddenly drops, the benefit of including keywords in URLs and more.

Rand Fishkin extols the virtues of and details the process for using the cannonical rel parameter to resolve duplicate content issues with less technical muss and fuss than implementing a 301 redirect. He outlines the tag’s purpose, operation, and treatment by search engines as well as answering common questions. The incredible number of comments this post generated is a testament to the tag’s importance in the SEO toolbag.

David Berkowitz reports on how critical video is to attaining a first-page ranking on Google, reporting on a study showing that “Videos are 53 times more likely to appear on the first page of search results than text pages.” This post from Remote Job Seekers also highlights the importance of video SEO.

Danny Dover updates one of the most indispensable guides to the SEO craft anywhere. Though written for beginners, even fairly experienced SEOs are likely to find at least a few new ideas, and helpful reminders, in this detailed guide to the robots.txt file, search engine tools and more.

In this extensive post, Glenn Gabe points out that the competitors for a keyword in SEO are often quite different from a company’s real world competitors; they can include reference sites, blogs, publications, review sites, directories and other websites that a business owner wouldn’t normally identify as “competition.” To support his point, Glenn uses example searches for flat screen TVs (only two manufacturers listed in the top 10 sites), HD video cameras (only Canon at #4), cabernet sauvignon and fuel efficient cars (no makers listed in the top search results).

Jon Rognerud reveals what matters to Google when indexing and ranking pages, and what doesn’t. He provides tips on design (how to get Google’s spider to read your text before your menu links), how to get your site indexed in 24 hours or less (though you need to be careful with this technique), and what Google ignores (e.g. the meta keywords tag, duplicate links, and graphics—except for the alt tag assigned to them).

George Aspland offers an excellent primer on incorporating SEO considerations from the start when doing a website redesign, from the initial site audit and keyword research through navigation, linking and URL structure changes.

Rich Cherecwich delves into the details of two “gray hat” SEO practices that are best avoided: link buying and domain buying. He also gives advice on what to do if your site does somehow get blacklisted by the search engines.

In this long guest post, Ben McKay starts off with the contention that “with market research, planning, implementation, creative flare, and an ongoing feedback loop of course, you can do just that –(SEO to draw the right kind of traffic) the same way you attempt to carry-out more traditional marketing campaigns.” He then goes on to discuss the art vs. science of SEO, ROI measurement, what SEO practitioners can learn from traditional marketing, before concluding “A more fulfilling and professional online presence could be found from thinking along structured lines—both in the way you operate with clients and also the way you achieve your SEO goals.”

Supporting my recent post on the insidious nofollow attribute, this post notes that “the entire Internet is built on the premise of hyperlinking and as The Pasty Muncher says it here: ‘Links form the chain that holds the web together.'” The writer notes that WordPress blogs are nofollow by default, but again you can fix that with the dofollow WordPress plugin. Just say “no” to nofollow.

In this controversial post (just read the comments!), Bill Slawski reports on a patent from Yahoo! that seems to suggest the search engine can “optimize” pages automatically. Bill outlines what’s in the patent, then points out a number of obvious flaws in any such approach, including “A site owner might want to target less popular search terms on pages that are a few directory levels deep in their site and have those pages rank well for searches that their audience will conduct rather than target more popular terms with those pages, and rank very poorly.”

Darren Rowse provides a detailed analysis of his blog visits from various sources—which, given the obscene volume of traffic his blog draws, is probably fairly representative of blogs in general. Among his findings: organic search is the source of both the highest volume and best quality of traffic. Social traffic (e.g. StumbleUpon and Digg) is “spiky” and doesn’t convert well, but supports SEO through the links generated. There’s lots more red meat for web analytics data junkies as well.

The insightful Carrie Hill writes that “In doing a wide variety research into what is and isn’t working for a small business Web site, I find the most frequent issues fall within the following six categories.” These include duplicate content, lack of keyword research, ignoring link building, and…read her post!

Michael Wong condenses all of the top SEO techniques into this one relatively short article, from generating internal and incoming links and the proper use of meta tags to guidance on site maps, keyword density and moving Javascript into separate files.

Aaron Wall makes the case for SEO with a brief case study of two similar websites. Though one may quibble with details here (on-page optimization accounts for only 5% of search position for competitive keywords?!) but his overall argument is pretty incontestable.

In this brilliant piece, Max Capener provides a dozen tips for optimizing meta description tags to help get the click even when your site doesn’t get a top 3 spot in the search rankings. These tactics range from adding a phone number or special characters to your description to catch the searcher’s eye to keeping title tags as short as possible and using friendly URLs. As Max notes, “No significant weight is given to the meta description for SEO purposes. It is therefore a great opportunity to use this space to help sell the click.”

While noting that “Google’s ranking algorithm takes into account approximately 200+ attributes when determining the position of websites in search engine results,” Lorna Li details the top 10 factors that account for most of the ranking results. This helpful post shows the relative importance of keywords, links, site age and other factors.

In this outstanding post, frequent best-of contributor Matt McGee provides a visual model of SEO in pyramid form, with factors such as Planning and Patience at the base, rising to Trust at the peak. The post links to a full-size printable version of the model, handy for tacking up on your wall for inspiration and guidance when scoping out a new SEO project.

In one of the best lists of SEO resources ever—and I do not say that lightly—Danny Dover provides links to and short summaries of “almost 100 tools and learning resource that help to master Internet Marketing,” from tools for link building and keyword research to a wide range of learning resources and tools for social media marketing. Bookmark this page and keep it near the top of your list. Another great post from Danny is The Beginner’s Checklist for Learning SEO, a step-by-step guide to creating a well-optimized website.

Google made quite a splash when it published this guide last November. They not only provided practical, helpful information for SEO’s trying to optimize for dominant search engine but legitimized the entire practice as well. In this post, Brandon Falls briefly explains the purpose and content of the guide.

Shannon Hutcheson does an excellent job of dissecting why redirects are important and the relative value of different types of redirects. A bit more instructional information about server-side redirects and using .htaccess for redirects—or links to such info—would have been a nice touch, but this is an helpful post nonetheless.

Frequent “best of” contributor Ann Smarty provides tools and techniques for analyzing your competitors’ keywords, backlinks and social media presence, noting that these tasks are critical because “promoting a site without proper competition research means to promote it blind (and) if you focus on finding what your competitor is doing profoundly wrong, you have good chances to get ahead of him.”

Bare Lying Google Myths by HomeBiz Resource
Louis Liem summarizes the Q&A from a Google webmaster event by dispelling a number of common myths about SEO and how Google ranks websites. Among the myths flayed here: duplicate content isn’t that big of a deal, although webmasters should “make it easy for us (Google) to find the preferred version;” XML sitemaps harm your rankings (quite the opposite!); and PageRank is everything (no, Google uses this, but it’s only one of more than 200 factors that determine where your pages will show up in searches for specific search terms).

Peter Da Vanzo offers an outstanding primer on preparing SEO proposals, from really understanding the client’s world and using tools like Google Traffic Estimator to show the value of search traffic to determining if there’s a suitable fit between you and the client.

An excellent follow-up to Peter’s post above is this one from Eric Lander, in which he outlines how to draft an ideal SEO proposal that both educates and “sells” the client. Eric contents that a proposal is not to be confused with an estimate; in his words, “A proposal is a document that outlines the goals of a project, states the objective, target audience, assignment of responsibilities, and so on. In the ideal situation, offer some ‘sell’ information as well – or credentials that justify your staff and organizations legitimacy.” An estimate is a preview of the expected costs of the project—which can be affected by how well your initial proposal is crafted.

Julie Batten translates “SEO speak,” providing definitions for more than a dozen commonly used terms / jargon in search marketing. Experienced SEOs know what these terms mean of course, but it’s helpful to keep in mind when talking to clients or prospects, particularly when drafting a proposal (see above), that most other people don’t. In many communications, it’s best to avoid jargon or at least define it.

Duncan Morris recommends explaining SEO to prospective clients using a simple triangular diagram to show the three core areas of SEO: content (on-page factors), technical issues and trust (links and ratings). It’s a highly simplified model for SEO, but as Duncan astutely notes, “often SEO is about doing the simple things right, and being able to communicate with your potential clients.”

SEO projects often begin with keyword research, but this post recommends stepping back and beginning with solid architecture instead: assuring that CSS and Java are handled properly, the site has a solid internal link structure, and both HTML and XML sites maps are utilized.

The spammy title aside, this is a solid piece on SEO basics. Titus Hoskins has compiled a useful list of 10 factors to include in SEO projects, from the basic content /keywords / links to taking advantage of Google Webmaster Tools, article marketing and building traffic hubs within your site structure.

Noting that “more than 70 percent of internet users start off with a search engine before they buy a product or service,” Claudia Bruemmer covers an impressive amount of ground in this article. She provides an excellent primer on SEO staring with objectives, keyword research and onsite optimization techniques and continuing on through SEO tools, local search, image optimization, video, online PR and blogs.

The brilliant and creative Ian Lurie offers ten (well, eight really) title tag formulas that provide both SEO and branding benefits along with suggestions for best practices to satisfy both search engine bots and your human site visitors.

Beating down the SEO is dead argument that pops up periodically, David Harry provides a “mental 301 redirect” by noting the continual stream of new techniques and technologies SEOs need to master (such as mobile search and universal search), core SEO topics that are often overlooked (e.g., TrustRank—Google and Yahoo versions), and underappreciated concepts related to modern search (for example, Yahoo Personalized PageRank and HarmonicRank) capable of inducing a deer-in-the-headlights stare from many if not most SEO practitioners.

Suggesting that “If the individual pages are wired together (with SEO in mind) at the early stages of design, this makes for easier implementation of other key components for on and off-page optimization,” this brief but instructive post provides a four-step plan to lay the groundwork for effective on-site SEO before the design stage begins.

DazzlinDonna Fontenot nicely explains the basic goals of SEO: to help search engines find, index, understand, evaluate and rank the pages on your website. Not just for newbies, this is also a helpful post for experienced SEO consulants to use in explaining the goals (and limitations) of SEO to prospective new clients.

The ubiquitous, oblivious Lee Odden explains the symbiotic relationship between PR and SEO: PR tools and techniques (such as online press release distribution, social media relations and blogger outreach) build valuable links that help with your SEO efforts, while producing well-optimized, relevant content for your industry increases the odds that harried journalists will find you and write about you.

Correcting an earlier post entitled “Content Has Never Been The King,” the author notes that “If your site doesn’t have quality content, a Google search engineer can crush it with a simple push of a button. On the other hand, if your site’s content is of stellar quality, a Google engineer who came across it would love it. This doesn’t mean they will give you a manual boost—Google doesn’t work that way. It does mean that you are protected because of the quality of your site. Google isn’t going to smack the legitimate, solid sites.” This post also inspired an amazing 172 comments; suffice it to say, opinions on this topic aren’t exactly universally in sync.

Even SEO tactics that are common knowledge can cause problems if poorly applied. With that in mind, this post warns against potential SEO errors like crafting less-than-optimal page titles, writing too much for search engines (and not enough for human readers), and building links from low-value sites or bad neighborhoods.

The exceedingly modest Darren Slatten demonstrates in very entertaining fashion that keyword stuffing doesn’t always harm your search position—even if you want it to. Okay, so it’s not the most useful SEO post of last year, but c’mon, how often do you read a post about search that’s actually kinda funny?

If you’ve ever experienced a sudden, gut-wrenching drop in your site’s search engine position, Karen Scharf presents five possible reasons. SEO efforts themselves (making too many content changes or adding too many new links in a short time period) can even sometimes trigger a drop, though this is generally a temporary situation.

This dispatch from last August’s Search Engine Strategies event details a presentation from Shawn Moore of Think Profits on tactics for getting a site to the first page of Google. Among Shawn’s tips: write a blog, make sure your database is crawlable by search engine spiders, and create optimized press releases.

Writing that the ideal engine would be “Your best friend with instant access to all the world’s facts and a photographic memory of everything you’ve seen and know,” Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience at Google reveals several attributes of the future direction of search at Google, which will incorporate new modes (e.g. voice, natural language, images, audio), a wider variety of media, personalization, and machine language translation.

Noting that “Google News can bring tons of traffic and boost your site performance, ” the brilliant Ann Smarty explains the technical requirements for inclusion as well as recommendations (i..e use properly labeled images and video, mobile-friendly design, update frequency of at least three times per day) for high ranking.

SEO expert Brent D. Payne summarizes nuggets of SEO knowledge gleaned from an interview Eric Enge did with Matt Cutts. Among his conclusions: social media marketing is a valid link-building activity, widgetbait is helpful for SEO, anchor text should be natural (i.e., not too many links pointing to your site with the same exact text), and, wait, there’s more!

Glen Allsopp offers his list of SEO health check items for websites, including use of proper use of the non-WWW to WWW redirect, unique page titles, sitemaps, anchor text, header tags and more. My only quarrel would be with the inclusion of insidious no-follow tags, which should be banned not encouraged.

First off, you gotta love that title. Web design guru Stoney deGeyter explains four coding issues that can “screw up your on-page optimization processes,” such as a very high code-to-content ratio, and how to fix them.

Writer Michael Estrin interviews a group of SEO experts to dispel some “common misperceptions about SEO” such as that SEO is about secret tactics, submitting your site to thousands of directories is helpful, SEO is a one-time event, and my favorite, “SEO is free.” Among the experts are Danny Sullivan, Aaron Wall and Shimon Sandler.

In another piece from iMedia Connection, Andrew Hazen, founder/CEO of Internet marketing firm PRIME Visibility, offers 10 simple steps to improve SEO results for the site that can be applied anywhere, such as using keyword-rich text-based navigation in place of Javascript menus and optimizing H1 and H2 tags.

SEO educator Jennifer Laycock offers small business owners and SEO newbies “five steps that…can go a long way toward helping you build a good understanding of what organic optimization is all about,” including search-friendly design, proper keyword research and on-page optimization.

Taken together, this post and the resulting comments provide an interesting discourse on why microsites are bad for SEO—but why you may want to use them anyway (to support multiple brands, for time-sensitive campaigns, etc.).

In part one of this series, SEO pro Scott Van Achte provides a comprehensive guide to the factors that need to be considered on-page website optimization, including title and meta tags, synonyms, headings and navigation. Even for experienced SEO practitioners, this post serves as a good reminder of what not to forget.

Since Google is the most important search engine for SEOs, it’s helpful to understand how its engineers view search. Udi Manber, VP of Search Quality, provides a glimpse behind the curtain. He doesn’t share any deep, dark secrets in this post, but does reveal some interesting information, such as the reduced importance of Pagerank and the sheer volume of changes Google makes to its algorithm each year (more than 450 in 2007; no wonder search positions for individual sites are so volatile).

U.K.-based SEO consultant Brian Turner makes a compelling case for buying SEO services based on your specific needs—but most definitely not on price. As Brian bluntly points out, “”Buying SEO services by price point alone is definitely in invitation for poor quality services, and even worse, can invite a penalty in Google. India has probably done more than any other country to position itself as the ‘SEO spam’ capital, with a huge number of companies fighting to offer the cheapest service that delivers the smallest results.”

Craig Macdonald, VP of Marketing and Product Management at marketing analytics provider Covario, outlines a “a strategic, scalable system for success” at SEO. His advice, which includes setting up a search “center of excellence” and performing sophisticated analysis, is targeted primarily at very large enterprises, though other pieces of information—such as noting that page file names are much more important to Google than Yahoo results—are more universally helpful.

In another noteworthy article fro iMedia, Andrew Rodrigues of Geary Interactive explores how the emergence of social bookmarking, blended search, link competition and other developments have forced a more strategic approach to SEO.

When it comes to SEO, size does matter. William Flaiz, VP of SEO at Razorfish, offers a guide to SEO for very large websites, from site architecture and internal linking strategies to social media and reputation management.

This posts suggests that Google’s “previous query” feature may be one explanation for volatile search rankings, though as one commenter points out, later changes to the algorithm may have blunted this effect somewhat.

An outstanding post from DazzlinDonna listing her favorite resources and guides for help with everything from SEO and online reputation management to blogging and social media marketing. It’s almost like a syllabus for your own self-paced interactive marketing guru course.

Writer Brandon Cornett gets to the heart of SEO in this concise and practical article, detailing “five simple tasks you can perform on your website over the next few days to improve your search engine visibility and traffic levels” from validating your keywords to creating an XML site map.

Betsy Schiffman posts a brief interview with the head of Google’s quality team. Included is Matt’s response to the question of whether SEO really works: “It does to some degree. Think of it this way: When you put a resume forward, you want it to be as clean as possible. If the resume is sloppy, you’re not going to get interviewed for the job. SEO is sort of like tweaking your resume . . . It’s helpful if you just think about which words people would use to search for your content. If you’re writing something about Mount Everest, for example, people are probably going to look for ‘How high is Mount Everest?’ . . . If done responsibly, [SEO] can be a great thing.”

Patrick Altoft notes that by the time an SEO strategy becomes popular, it generally doesn’t work anymore. While no one (other than Matt Cutts) knows what will be important next year, Patrick takes some guesses.

It’s no secret that SEO and SEM are each more effective when used together, but this post goes beyond the obvious to detail some specific strategies to use these tools together to dominate the home page of Google (or any other search engine) on a core set of specific terms.

A wealth of data about working in SEO, with an interesting high-level summary as well as links to detail data. Among the conclusions: the vast majority of SEOs are self-taught (ranging from close to 60% in SEM agencies to more than 80% of “self-employed, non-consultant” whatever that is); SEOs are underpaid (even in the U.S., close to half earn less than $60K per year and nearly 60% make less than $75K); and far too many use insidious no-follow tags.

Wendy Suto provides an excellent guide to improving your own SEO efforts by analyzing what competitors are doing in areas such as spider-friendly code, navigation, volume of content, meta tags, keyword density and external links. Understanding how the sites that rank higher than yours (or your client’s) for certain highly relevant key phrases can help you implement changes to leapfrog them.

A wonderful post on the challenges and rewards of working with small business owners on SEO. One key is to not overwhelm them with everything that needs doing at once; simply fixing title meta tags can often provide a significant bang for a small number of bucks. And it’s true that small business owners are frequently more appreciative and loyal than are big companies.

SEO Step Ten Of Ten: Keeping It Up by WebProNews
Jim Hedger writes about what to do once an SEO project is “done,” such as monitoring analytics and tweaking content, or as he puts it, “continuing to update the blog, link building and social media marketing.”

Dev Basu outlines five areas that form a foundation for SEO efforts, including proper internal linking, sitemaps and developing a blog. This was actually from December 2007, but I overlooked it last January. Oops.

In this witty and very useful SEO post, Derek Edmond pretty much skips the usual tips about title tags and internal links and instead provides some fresh, off-the-beaten-path ideas such as “Research 2 or 3 of your main competition’s websites for 1 or 2 things they have (on their site) that you don’t have (and want),” “Check your Google AdWords reports for three profitable keyword referrals that you had not been optimizing organically for” and “Find 2 industry related resources that offer opportunities for article submissions, record the contact information and set a goal of contacting them for information on how to send one of your articles.”

Search guru Lee Odden recommends getting creative rather than conservative when it comes to beefing up SEO efforts during a downturn. He recommends aggressive content promotion, using social media, and experimenting with universal search among other tactics.

SEO is fundamentally about driving website traffic. Generating clicks isn’t only a matter of top ranking, but also having a well-written description meta tag that appeals to searchers. Somewhat lower ranked sites can outdraw those in the top position with a description tag that is carefully crafted to appeal to both search engines and people.

Rob Garner provides a comprehensive checklist of key areas to examine and modify for organic search success. In addition to the obvious (e.g., title tags, copywriting and link development) Rob includes more esoteric areas such as canonicalization issues, removing session IDs and sourcing out on-page JavaScript and CSS to external files.

Because search engine algorithms are constantly changing, a solid link-building strategy shouldn’t be “trendy” but rather balanced between different types of link sites including blogs, forums, directories, articles and reciprocal link partners.

A fairly short yet very thoughtful post that is more strategic than tactical. Stepping back and answering some basic questions about why someone would visit your site and what exactly you’d like them to do there provides a helpful starting point for SEO efforts.

While this article doesn’t quite live up to its headline, it’s nevertheless an educational quick read for anyone starting link building efforts as well as a helpful refresher for more experienced SEO practitioners.

Another excellent post with a somewhat misleading title, this piece from Jon Clark is packed with three dozen checklist items to make sure your SEO tactics are on track, divided into home page, site and external activities. Items range from basic (formatting of title tags, use of H2 tags, internal text links) to advanced (setting up a domain name redirect, “link funneling” using insidious nofollow tags). While going through this list will take considerably longer than 60 minutes, but it’s a worthwhile effort.

This post helps SEO pros understand, at a high level, the “biases” built into search engine algorithms in order to craft strategies and tactics to capitalize on them. These biases include factors like “spamminess,” authority, blog buzz and links.

A thoughtful piece from Scott Buresh on the value of adjectives for search; using modifiers in search phrases can simplify SEO efforts while delivering more highly qualified traffic. This works with descriptors (e.g. “B2B email marketing” vs. just “email marketing”), location (e.g. “search marketing services Minnesota”) and other attributes.